Indonesian police have apologised and pledged disciplinary action after officers draped a live snake around the neck of a suspect to persuade him to confess during an interrogation session in the easternmost area of Papua.

A video circulated online shows a man being questioned about stolen mobile phones seated with his hands tethered behind his back yelling in distress as a snake is pushed towards his face by an officer.

The man, who can been seen writhing on the ground for much of the time is asked by an officer, “How may times have you stolen mobile phones?”

The suspect later responds by saying, “Only two times.”

During the video, a voice can be heard ordering the man to open his eyes and at one stage threatens to put the snake into his mouth and under his trousers.

In a statement, Jayawijaya police chief Tonny Ananda Swadaya issued an apology, saying, “The investigator was not professional in doing his job”.

Swadaya added that the officers had been acting on their own initiative to try get a confession, saying the snake was non-venomous and tame.

“We have taken stern action against the personnel,” he said, adding the officers themselves had not physically attacked the man.

A woman who called Houston’s non-emergency dispatch line after discovering a tiger inside a cage at an abandoned home told the shocked dispatcher: “I’m not lying.”

The Houston Chronicle obtained a recording of the call after animal rescue workers found the well-fed animal resting on a bed of hay Monday inside a cage they said could be easily opened.

Police say a group of people looking for a place to smoke marijuana happened across the tiger on Monday. The woman told the dispatcher: “It’s pretty big.” Authorities say the animal weighed 350 pounds (159 kilograms).

Investigators have leads into who owned the tiger but say it may not be the person who owns the property.

The tiger has been moved to an animal sanctuary in Texas. The tiger was nicknamed “Tyson” after the movie “The Hangover.”

A man’s nap in the back of his car in Delaware turned into a nightmare after the car he was sleeping in was stolen and crashed.

Musician Justin Koerner told the News Journal he had spent a night playing music with friends, went to sleep in his vehicle and had a dream involving someone jumping in his front seat.

A Newark police statement says someone drove off in the car Sunday morning and bailed after seeing the man sleeping in the back. Police say the car crashed.

Koerner says he awoke and saw car treads on a lawn and a destroyed bush, then realized he hadn’t been dreaming. He says police appeared ready to take him away before another officer said a neighbor had security camera footage of the incident.

A Philadelphia real estate investor says a home he was scoping out came with an unadvertised surprise — a stairway booby-trapped with a swinging knife.

Ekrem Uysaler says he and his team were looking at the home in January when one of his co-workers saw a small line on the home’s staircase. WCAU-TV reports he stopped his construction manager from heading up the stairs and recorded video as they pulled the staircase line with a spare rod.

Pulling the line triggered a fast-moving, downward-swinging crutch from above the staircase. Taped to the end of the crutch was a large knife pointing right to where a person’s head would have been walking up the stairs.

Uysaler says he has never encountered something like this before. He says “It’s like ‘Home Alone’ … Philly style.”

Patients ask me all the time if I know if they are receiving old blood or young blood, and I reassure them that either will be effective.

At the same time, there is no convincing evidence that the use of transfused blood from younger patients has magical anti-aging properties to it. As a matter of fact, studies have shown no benefit in terms of outcome or survival when fresher red blood cells are transfused as opposed to older red blood cells.

Nevertheless, a new startup, known as Ambrosia, started by a Stanford University Medical School graduate, is charging thousands of dollars to transfuse younger blood into older patients veins with the unproven promise of slowing the aging process.

A college student says she found a man in her closet wearing her clothes.

The University of North Carolina-Greensboro student heard strange noises coming from her closet in her off-campus apartment on Saturday. The student told WFMY-TV she asked who was in there and was told “My name’s Drew.”

The student, who asked only to be identified as Maddie, opened the door to find the man sitting on the floor in her clothing with a bag full of clothes, shoes and socks. She talked to him for about 10 minutes and texted photos to her boyfriend.

The man left when the boyfriend arrived.

Police arrested the 30-year-old at a nearby gas station. He was charged with misdemeanor breaking and entering.

For nearly two weeks, Shirell Powell stood vigil over her brother’s bedside in a New York hospital, believing there was nothing more doctors could do to save him.

She was told he was brain-dead — the result of a narcotics overdose — so in late July 2018, a grieving Powell gave her permission to take him off life support and her brother was pronounced dead.

A couple of weeks later, Powell was notified that the man she was about to lay to rest was someone with a similar name, Freddy Clarence Williams. Her brother, 40-year-old Frederick Williams, was very much alive.

Powell is suing St. Barnabas Hospital for negligence and is seeking monetary relief. She says she “suffered severe emotional harm and injuries” as a result of the hospital mistakenly identifying the unconscious man as her brother, according to court documents.

A Bay Area woman is accused of posing as a pharmacist and handling out nearly a million prescriptions before she was caught, the California Board of Pharmacy confirmed Wednesday.

According to the Board of Pharmacy, Kim Thien Le told them she’d attended Creighton University, but records revealed she’d never graduated. When the Board asked Le for her pharmacist license number, they said they discovered Le had used the license numbers of two pharmacists with similar names.

During questioning, Le told the Board “me and my son would be very grateful if you could just forget about this.” According to documents filed by the Board, Le handled 745,355 prescriptions in the course of a decade as a pharmacist and pharmacy manager.

She worked at Walgreens in San Jose, Milpitas and Fremont.

“I’m just shocked beyond belief that this would happen here at Walgreens, a place that we trust,” said customer Sandra Cervantez. “It really makes me suspect of how we’re checking pharmacists’ backgrounds.”

Le isn’t the only one in trouble. The Board is looking at revoking Walgreens’s pharmacy license at the stores where Le worked. Walgreens couldn’t tell the Board if they’d requested or reviewed Le’s pharmacist license and couldn’t furnish her employment application during the agency’s investigation.

The Board included Le’s Milpitas address on its documents. However, a KPIX 5 reporter went to the home and the man who answered the door denied Le lived there, although a records search conducted confirmed she did live there.

A Walgreens spokesperson said that Le stopped working for the company in 2017 and that the company “undertook a re-verification of the licenses of all our pharmacists nationwide to ensure that this was an isolated incident.”

When asked how Le was able to work at Walgreens for so long under the guise that she was a pharmacist, the spokesperson did not want to comment.

“Something has to change either with Walgreens or the way people are checked for their backgrounds,” said Cervantez.